Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 ‘Reform’ in English public life: the fortunes of a word
- 3 Parliament, the state, and ‘Old Corruption’: conceptualizing reform, c. 1790–1832
- 4 ‘Old wine in new bottles’: the concept and practice of law reform, c. 1780–1830
- 5 English ‘church reform’ revisited, 1780–1840
- 6 Medicine in the age of reform
- 7 British antislavery reassessed
- 8 ‘The age of physiological reformers’: rethinking gender and domesticity in the age of reform
- 9 Reforming the aristocracy: opera and elite culture, 1780–1860
- 10 Reform on the London stage
- 11 Reforming culture: national art institutions in the age of reform
- 12 Irish reform between the 1798 Rebellion and the Great Famine
- 13 Empire and parliamentary reform: the 1832 Reform Act revisited
- 14 Reforms, movements for reform, and possibilities of reform: comparing Britain and continental Europe
- Index
- Past and Present Publications
6 - Medicine in the age of reform
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 ‘Reform’ in English public life: the fortunes of a word
- 3 Parliament, the state, and ‘Old Corruption’: conceptualizing reform, c. 1790–1832
- 4 ‘Old wine in new bottles’: the concept and practice of law reform, c. 1780–1830
- 5 English ‘church reform’ revisited, 1780–1840
- 6 Medicine in the age of reform
- 7 British antislavery reassessed
- 8 ‘The age of physiological reformers’: rethinking gender and domesticity in the age of reform
- 9 Reforming the aristocracy: opera and elite culture, 1780–1860
- 10 Reform on the London stage
- 11 Reforming culture: national art institutions in the age of reform
- 12 Irish reform between the 1798 Rebellion and the Great Famine
- 13 Empire and parliamentary reform: the 1832 Reform Act revisited
- 14 Reforms, movements for reform, and possibilities of reform: comparing Britain and continental Europe
- Index
- Past and Present Publications
Summary
One week following the royal assent to the 1832 Reform Act, an editorial in the medical journal the Lancet remarked: ‘The abuses under which we groan in all the departments of our profession have but one source, and that is, misgovernment. Hence to this one point, and to this one point only, should the whole of our remedial exertions be directed.’ The Lancet's identification of ‘misgovernance’ as its prime target is indicative of a fundamental assumption shared by reformers in medicine and politics – that is, their diagnosis of the ills of society as essentially political in nature. Given the characteristics of this particular crusading journal, its focus on governance should come as no surprise. Founded in 1823 by the surgeon Thomas Wakley, the Lancet stood at the centre of a sustained and vitriolic campaign for wholesale medical reform, a campaign in which medicine and politics blended insensibly into one another. Wakley's own activities and associations embodied this very conflation: a regular participant and chair of National Political Union meetings in the 1820s and 1830s, an intimate of William Cobbett, Henry Hunt, and Joseph Hume, editor of the short-lived Ballot newspaper (1830) dedicated to the cause of radical political reform, and from 1834 MP for the newly created borough of Finsbury, Wakley was deeply engaged in metropolitan radicalism.
This political engagement is fully evident in both the tone and substance of Wakley's medical journalism.
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- Information
- Rethinking the Age of ReformBritain 1780–1850, pp. 163 - 181Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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